SEO Strategies for New Websites

SEO Strategies for New Websites

Whether or not you're launching a website for an existing business or one that is starting from scratch, making sure that SEO is being correctly included site-wide on a new website can be a difficult proposition. While SEO is a long term investment, giving yourself a strong platform to build on is one of the most important parts of doing good SEO that will help put your business on the right path from as soon as a new site goes live.
Today's question deals with the issue of SEO for new websites - with a user wanting to know: What are some SEO tactics I can do to help get my new website off the ground?

Make Sure Google Can Crawl Your Website

The first and easiest thing you can do to help get your new website off to a good start in terms of SEO is to make sure that your website is crawlable and indexable by Google's crawl bots. A lot of the time people forget to set their pages as indexable and followable, and as a result Google can't properly crawl the page and rank it appropriately. This is immensely important and can easily become a problem for any business' new website.
A lot of the time when new websites are in the development process the whole domain is set to "nofollow, noindex" in order to keep half finished pages from showing up in the search engine results. When the page is pushed live, people then forget that this was the case and don't make the appropriate changes to "follow, index". Make sure you triple check this before your website goes live so that it doesn't happen to you.

Check Character Counts

Another thing a new website should focus on when it is first getting started is having appropriate meta titles and meta descriptions. Obviously you want these to include keywords you're actively trying to rank for, but just as important is making sure that each title is at the appropriate character length. Google has made changes to the format of their search results recently, which means that meta titles and meta descriptions are now at about 60 and 120 character limits respectively. Go through your website and make sure that each page is meeting those requirements.
A couple of easy ways to check is by using Webmaster Tools, or by doing a site scrape with a tool like Screaming Frog and then plugging each title and meta description into an excel document to see how many characters both are on each page.

Stand Out From Your Competitors

One critical mistake that is often seen on new websites are webpages that contain generic content that doesn't stand out from the competition. We at Blue Fountain Media understand that having a dynamic and unique content on every webpage is crucial for SEO success. That is why it is important to research your competitors that rank for the keywords you want to rank for and find ways that you can differentiate from and improve upon the content in that webpage.Using online tools like Copyscape are a great way to help you see if your content is similar to anyone elses on the website.
If you can't really spin content in a different way then try presenting the same content in a different way. For example, you can do a video or infographic in order to make your content visual and compelling.

Make Navigation Easy With Appropriate Internal Linking

Nowadays, the best SEO is a combination of user experience and technical SEO. This is no different when first starting a website - particularly when it comes to user navigation and overall page layout on a domain. Making sure you've identified what pages are the most important to your website and then doing appropriate internal linking will not only help those pages get better rankings in the search results, it will make it easier for users to navigate to appropriate pages with ease.
An added benefit of taking the time to do this is that your business will flourish if the pages that perform best from a sales perspective are internally linked together correctly, as users will be more likely to get to them (both from other pages and directly from an organic search) and convert with your business.
To view more of our videos answering questions from around the web, and for more information about video marketing, you can check out our other responses here. If you have a question about digital marketing or any of the other services that we offer, leave it in the comments section below or tweet it at us @BFMweb and we will answer it for you.

Video Transcript

Hey, my name's Brendon Rowe. I'm an SEO specialist at Blue Fountain Media, and today we have a question from the Internet that asks: "What are some SEO tactics I can do to help get my new website off the ground?"
Well that's a really good question. So you really want to think about it a little bit differently than you would if you had an existing website. So for example, making sure that your website's crawlable and indexable. This is something that happens to a lot of new web sites. You want to basically make sure that Google search bots, which are used to help Google crawl your website and understand the content on there so you can help get the rankings are looking for, are able to go to each page and that there's nothing blocking them.
The next thing that you really want to do is to know what are you a brand authority on. So that includes knowing what your website's going to be talking about, doing keyword research on all those topics, and then doing your best to try to answer each of those queries on your website in a way that stands out from the competition out there.
Another thing that you can really do is to know what are the most important pages on a website that you want draw your users towards. And then really thinking about how can I use the rest the pages on my website to help funnel those users to those pages and those are really going to help you with your business goals.
Then what you really want to make sure they are doing is to have your meta titles and meta descriptions be the appropriate character limit. A couple months ago Google actually made the text on their search engine results page bigger, so meta titles and meta descriptions went down about five character counts. Now it's more like 60 characters for a meta title and you have about 120 characters and you have for a meta description. Really keep that in mind when you're building out your pages and creating those.
The final thing that you really want to think about is to make sure to your website is giving a clear message as to what the content's about not only in terms of Google, but also for the users as well so that they're getting a great experience and that they're sending the appropriate signals to say, "hey this website stands out above the other ones."
That's all I have - if you have any questions feel free to leave a question in the comments section below.